Auros (formerly UserTesting, Inc.)

What is Auros?

Auros is the renamed corporate entity of the company formerly known as UserTesting, Inc. It provides customer experience research, AI training data and human insight services through the UserTesting and User Interviews product brands.

Who owns Auros?

Auros is owned by private equity firm Thoma Bravo with co-investor Sunstone Partners, which took UserTesting private for about $1.3 billion in October 2022.

Is UserTesting still a company?

The legal entity now operates as Auros following a September 2026 rebrand. UserTesting remains the name of the flagship product platform.

What happened to UserZoom?

UserZoom merged with UserTesting in April 2023 under common Thoma Bravo ownership. Its technology and customers have been consolidated into the combined platform now operated by Auros.

Where is Auros headquartered?

Auros is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington, in the Seattle metropolitan area.

How many customers does Auros have?

Auros serves more than 2,500 customers, including more than half of the world's 100 most valuable brands, backed by a network of 7.6 million verified research participants.

The company's story starts with UserTesting, founded in 2007 in San Francisco by Dave Garr and Darrell Benatar. The founding insight was that watching real users struggle with a product delivered better design feedback than internal review, and that video-recorded user sessions could be sold as a service.

UserTesting defined the unmoderated remote usability testing category and grew into the default tool for UX research teams. It raised venture funding through the 2010s, acquired smaller players like Truthlab and Teston, and went public on the NYSE in November 2021 under ticker USER.

The public stint was short. Growth slowed post-pandemic, and in October 2022 Thoma Bravo and Sunstone Partners completed a $1.3 billion take-private at $7.50 per share. Thoma Bravo had separately invested in rival UserZoom in January 2023, and the two companies merged that April, combining UserTesting's video-first platform with UserZoom's enterprise research suite.

Eric Johnson, a former SurveyMonkey executive, became CEO in September 2024. The January 2026 acquisition of User Interviews added the industry's largest dedicated research participant network, and in September 2026 the combined company rebranded as Auros, positioning itself for AI-era demand for verified human feedback.

The September 2026 rebrand consolidated everything under the Auros name: UserTesting's panel and enterprise customer base, UserZoom's research operations platform, and User Interviews' participant recruiting became one product line marketed to UX research, product and design teams. The company pitched the combination as the only end-to-end offering covering participant sourcing, moderated and unmoderated testing, and research repositories under a single contract.

Behind the naming sits a classic private equity roll-up logic. Each of the three predecessor companies had hit growth ceilings independently in a fragmented market, and combining them was designed to produce a category leader large enough to resist commoditization by survey tools and emerging AI-moderated research products.